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Friday, September 22, 2017

Melania Trump’s Crimes of Fashion

The left spent eight years gushing about
Michelle Obama as a First Lady style icon second only to – if anyone – Jackie O.
Embraced enthusiastically by the fashion world, Michelle appeared on magazine
covers from InStyle to Glamour to Vogue (multiple times). At
the end of Barack’s Oval Office tenure, HuffPost even posted a farewell piece
to Michelle titled, “Michelle
Obama Breaks Hearts With Final Vogue Cover As First Lady.” “Looking
ethereal in a white Carolina Herrera gown, she is, as usual, the epitome of
elegance and grace,” HuffPost fawned breathlessly.

Last year, with Michelle on her way out, the heartbroken
left, looking forward to Hillary Clinton as President, began to wax
enthusiastic about Hillary’s “presidential”
pantsuits. Had she won the election, there is no question that fashion critics
would then have spent the next four years wracking their brains finding ways to
praise Hillary’s boxy,
Mao-inspired,
solid-printtents.
But Donald Trump burst that bubble, and the traumatized left watched as he and
his wife, the stunning former model Melania, moved into the White House instead.

As impossible as
it might seem to find something to criticize about Melania’s simultaneously classy
and sexy style, the media were determined to turn positives into negatives. “The
former model’s daytime fashion choices often show a businesslike polish,” the Washington
Post inexplicably complained. This is a bad thing? At least with Melania we
know we’ll never be subjected to the kinds of unpolishedclothingchoices
Michelle Obama sometimes made, which the fashion media never thought to
criticize. “She knows fashion. She knows her angles,” WaPo wrote about
the photogenic Melania. For the first time in the history of fashion writing, that
wasn’t intended as a compliment.

When Mrs. Trump accompanied her husband to the
scene of hurricane devastation in Texas recently, the pearl-clutching media
gasped collectively in misplaced outrage because she boarded Air Force One in stiletto
heels. “Those shoes. Those shoes. Good Lord, those shoes,” gawked WaPo jealously.
“She defies gravity in them. She floats above it all.” The media collectively condemned
her thusly: “Melania Trump is the kind of woman who travels to a flood-ravaged
state in a pair of black snakeskin stilettos.” The heels “suggested that Trump
is the kind of woman who refuses to pretend that her feet will, at any point,
ever be immersed in cold, muddy, bacteria-infested Texas water.” It didn’t
matter to them that, before disembarking, she changed out of those shoes into
white sneakers, because the media took umbrage at that footwear choice as well –
because white sneakers are racist, I’m guessing.

In ‘There
Was No Pretense About Melania Trump’s Heels, But Sometimes a Little Pretense
Helps,” the self-important Washington Post dismissed President and
First Lady Trump’s visit to Texas as nothing but obligatory optics, and then
proceeded to slam them for not getting the optics right. “[S]ometimes pretense
is everything,” WaPo wrote – something the leftist media would never
have stated about Barack and Michelle Obama. The paper criticized Melania for “offer[ing]
up a fashion moment instead of an expression of empathy.” Cultural scholar
Rhonda Garelick critiqued Melania as well for “labeling” herself with a “FLOTUS”
cap.

Professor Garelick has written twice now about
Melania for New York Magazine’s The Cut blog. First, in “Why
it Matters That Melania Wore Dior in Paris Last Week,” Garelick spun an
entire anti-feminist narrative out of a Christian Dior design Melania wore on
the Trumps’ Bastille Day visit to Paris:

[T]he Dior style
telegraphs a very particular, 1950s vision of womanhood (as did the First
Lady’s bouffant updo), which resonates with the state of American politics
today…

Dior’s designs
were saturated with a yearning for a mythic past when aristocratic women molded
their bodies into exaggerated, ornamental, nearly immobilizing shapes — a past
sanitized of less pretty realities (like the starving peasants, for example)...
Such royalist nostalgia can live comfortably in a Paris fashion museum; in the
United States, however, it lives in the White House.

The Trump family
and administration seem to embrace the rigid gender distinctions of the 1950s
(or the French aristocracy), evoking a nearly prerevolutionary world of gilded
palaces, fawning nobles (or cabinet secretaries), and governance through family
dynasty. Even Ivanka, sitting in for her father at the Hamburg G20, wore an
oddly girlish, baby-pink dress with giant bows on swinging sleeves... (That
dress sparked some debate over whether Ivanka’s purported feminism was
consistent with pink bows…)

The fact that Ivanka’s pink bows “sparked some
debate” about feminism gives you some idea of the fragile, inconsequential, and
yes, misogynistic state of feminism today. In any case, Garelick went on to
undermine her own argument by conceding that Melania also wore the creations of
other French designers during the visit; in other words, Garelick simply zeroed
in on the one dress she could use to suggest that Melania is the new Marie
Antoinette, and ignored the others.

In Garelick’s more recent piece, “Melania
Trump and the Chilling Artifice of Fashion,” the professor viewed Melania’s
high heels as a reflection of the entire Trump presidency. “The problem
is not that Melania Trump wore an unsuitable, blithely out-of-touch outfit,
although she did. The problem is that this administration turns every event —
no matter how dire — into a kind of anesthetized luxury fashion shoot, which
leads us to some disturbing political truths.”

The “profound truth” Garelick sees is that the
Trump administration “is as dissociative as a fashion advertisement, brought to
power by manipulating and rechanneling the electorate’s desires for wealth and
possessions.” That is pompous nonsense; Donald Trump was not voted into office
because the peasant electorate was somehow enchanted by his wealth. Equally
nonsensical are her assertion that the Trump administration turns every
event into an advertisement, and her insulting claim that the “Trump women evince a
dazed blankness and anonymity that in turn cast doubt on the reality of
everything around them.” If anything is dissociated from
reality, it is that kind of academic gibberish.

For most women, fashion is shallow fun and
nothing more. But for the media, now that a despised Republican is in the White
House, virtually everything the First Lady wears will be an occasion for either
a bitchy personal attack or an excuse to pontificate about the evils of the
administration. FLOTUS, however, will float above it all in her stilettos, untouched
by their pettiness, maintaining a dignified beauty. Because that’s Melania’s
style.

About Me

Mark is the editor of TruthRevolt and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes about culture and politics for Acculturated, FrontPage Magazine, The Federalist, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He has made television appearances on CNN, Glenn Beck and elsewhere, as well as many radio and public appearances.
Mark has worked on numerous films including co-writing the award-winning documentary “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.”
He is currently adapting a book for the big screen and writing one of his own for Templeton Press.